Hawaii’s Mountains – Here’s a link to the live web cam on the summit of near 13,800 foot Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. This web cam is available during the daylight hours here in the islands…and when there’s a big moon shining down during the night at times. Plus, during the nights you will be able to see stars, and the sunrise and sunset too… depending upon weather conditions.

Aloha Paragraphs

Our trade winds will continue blowing well into the future

Heavy rain will fall at times - with potential floodingFlash Flood Watch…entire state of Hawaii

~~~ Hawaii Weather Narrative ~~~

Our trade winds will remain active…blowing generally in the moderately strong range.Here’s the latestweather map, showing the Hawaiian Islands, and the rest of the North Pacific Ocean, along with a real-time wind profile of the central Pacific…focused on the Hawaiian Islands. We have a moderately strong high pressure system located to the north of the state, along with a ridge running well offshore to our north and northwest. At the same time, we have a trough of low pressure moving through the state from east to west. The forecast calls for the winds to remain active through this weekend into the new week ahead. There will however be temporary pauses in the strength of the trade winds through Monday, which will become more steady Tuesday onwards.Satellite imageryshows a mix of high, middle, and low level clouds…along with thunderstorms over and around the islands.Looking at this larger looping satellite image, it shows this threatening area of rainy weather…along with some blossoming thunderstorms, and high clouds streaming overhead from the southwest. Here’s thelooping radar, showing considerable passing showers moving across our area, many of which are heavy…around the state now. These showers are bringing flooding conditions to some areas, particularly around the island of Kauai at the time of this writing. An upper level low pressure system, located near the state, in conjunction with the moisture being brought into the state by a low pressure trough…are setting up this dangerous rainfall situation.

The headline weather news through the next couple of days…will be on this tropical moisture passing across the state.The first tropical system of the summer, which began in the eastern Pacific earlier this week, and moved into our central Pacific several days ago…has since been retired. However, former tropical cyclone Wali is still a remnant low pressure system, which while passing across our area at this time, is bringing very moist air over the state. This in turn is bringing copious rainfall with localized thunderstorms…and serious flooding in places. It will take until Tuesday or so before these inclement weather conditions move to the west of Hawaii, allowing a typical trade wind weather pattern to return. I’ll be back many times during the day with more updates on all of the above, I hope you have a great Sunday night wherever you’re spending it. Please be very careful while driving and being out and about, as dangerous flooding conditions will exist in many places. Finally, the models continue showing another round of tropical moisture arriving next weekend! Aloha for now…Glenn.

World-wide tropical cyclone activity:

Atlantic Ocean: There are no active tropical cyclones

A broad area of low pressure, associated with a tropical wave, is located over the eastern Atlantic Ocean about 900 miles west-southwest of the Cape Verde Islands. The associated showers and thunderstorms remain disorganized, and any development during the next day or two should be slow to occur. Beyond a couple of days, environmental conditions are expected to become unfavorable for development while the system moves westward to west-northwestward at 15 to 20 mph.

Shower and thunderstorm activity associated with an area of low pressure located about 800 miles south-southwest of Manzanillo, Mexico, has changed little during the past few hours. Some slow development of this system is possible during the next few days while it moves westward or west-northwestward at around 15 mph.

Interesting:Update: Melting permafrost and Global Warming - You have probably heard that melting permafrost is a big contributor to increasing the levels of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, and that melting permafrost may even cause an unstoppable acceleration of global warming.

New research, however, supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), counters this widely-held scientific view that thawing permafrost uniformly accelerates atmospheric warming, indicating instead that certain arctic lakes store more greenhouse gases than they emit into the atmosphere.

The study, published this week in the journal Nature, focuses on thermokarst lakes, which occur as permafrost thaws and creates surface depressions that fill with melted fresh water, converting what was previously frozen land into lakes.

The research suggests that arctic thermokarst lakes are “net climate coolers” when observed over longer, millennial, time scales.

“Until now, we’ve only thought of thermokarst lakes as positive contributors to climate warming,” said lead researcher Katey Walter Anthony, associate research professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Institute of Northern Engineering. “It is true that they do warm climate by strong methane emissions when they first form, but on a longer-term scale, they switch to become climate coolers because they ultimately soak up more carbon from the atmosphere than they ever release.”

The researchers observed that roughly 5,000 years ago, thermokarst lakes in ice-rich regions of North Siberia and Alaska began cooling, instead of warming the atmosphere.

“While methane and carbon dioxide emissions following thaw lead to immediate radiative warming,” the authors write, “carbon uptake in peat-rich sediments occurs over millennial time scales.”

Using published data from the circumpolar arctic, their own new field observations of Siberian permafrost and thermokarsts, radiocarbon dating, atmospheric modeling and spatial analyses, the research team studied how thawing permafrost is affecting climate change and greenhouse gas emissions.

Researchers found that “thermokarst basins switched from a net radiative warming to a net cooling climate effect about 5,000 years ago,” according to their article, published online today. They found that high rates of carbon accumulation in lake sediments were stimulated by several factors, including “thermokarst erosion and deposition of terrestrial organic matter, nutrient release from thawing permafrost that stimulated lake productivity, and by slow decomposition in cold, anoxic lake bottoms.”

We had 4.5 inches of rain between midday yesterday and 11am today, Hea’aula Place, Haiku~~~Hi Melissa, that’s what I call a very substantial amount of rainfall over a near 24 hour period…thanks for the report! Aloha, Glenn